Mercedes’ turnaround during the 2024 season has been bigger than the team was expecting, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin admits.
The first eight races of this season yielded a best result of fifth place in a grand prix for Mercedes, and the team had just 96 points to its name after the Monaco Grand Prix. Since then at least one Mercedes has finished on the podium at every race, with two pole positions and a run of three wins in the last four races delivering a step forward in terms of results that Shovlin says has come sooner than the team was targeting.
“The main thing is the progress,” Shovlin said. “Where we were in the early races in Bahrain and in Jeddah, it was difficult to look at the car and understand what it was you had to do to make it quick.
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“We could see it had certain strengths, but it also had plenty of weaknesses. The team has responded brilliantly to that challenge. We know where we want to get to in terms of performance level. We knew that we wanted to be winning races, and we set ourselves a target of by the end of the season, we wanted to be qualifying on pole and winning races.
“We have now had three wins in the last four races. We have had six podiums on the trot. That has perhaps been more than we had expected at that point. We are really enjoying the racing now. We are enjoying the challenge. It feels like the team has a bit of momentum behind it, and we are hoping that we can carry that into the final bit of the season, continue to develop and hopefully continue to win some races.”
The victory in Belgium came despite Mercedes reverting to a previous specification of car and removing some upgrades after Friday’s practice running, but Shovlin says the new parts are still a step forward that the team believes it can get on top of.
“The reason we reverted the car to the Silverstone spec on Friday night was because we had a good race in Silverstone,” he said. “Spa and Silverstone are not dramatically different circuits in terms of the corner speed range that you are dealing with.
“We had clearly introduced some problems somewhere. We think that was largely due to how we were running the car in Spa, not induced by the updates themselves. That was giving us a bit of bouncing in the high-speed corners, as well as a few issues with the balance. Going to that Silverstone car got it all back to normal.
“We have since had time to look at the data to understand what it was that we did, and we are pretty confident that we will be going for a reintroduction in Zandvoort.”